Transforming Adobe’s PDF Lineup

Today we are kicking off a journey to transform Acrobat, from our e-sign services to our mobile approach. Around the world, we’re seeing that sales people want their proposals to be differentiated from competitors. Students want their work to “stand out” in the crowd. Marketers want to publish materials that drive ROI and ensure that collateral looks great on any device. Organizations are looking to eliminate friction from sales processes. Creating and viewing PDFs that are dazzling, intelligent, and engaging should be simple. Acrobat DC and the Document Cloud represent a major step towards our vision of helping people and organizations manage end-to-end business transactions that involve stunning document experiences.

MODERN, IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES

In the touch-enabled world of 2015, we wanted to re-imagine the way people “re-mix” PDF content in a more natural way. To that end, we’ve created a product line-up that puts touch and “app-store models” center stage.

First off, we’re delivering a touch-first experience across phone, tablet and PC. This is a much more natural way for people to create engaging documents and browse content. You can rotate pages with your fingers and browse PDFs with a swipe of the finger. Second, we’ve introduced a new innovation called the Home screen which makes it easy for people to find recently viewed files across devices. It connects you to files on Creative Cloud, the Document Cloud, and Microsoft Office 365. Yes, that’s right, we’re also building out a set of broader connectors to other cloud services as well.

We believe that hunting around through different menus to find the right tool is old-school. The new Tool Center lets people find capabilities using an “app-store” approach. Of course, the tools have been refreshed to make it much easier to re-use content from a range of sources: Office files, web pages, PDFs, scanned images, photos, and so much more.

ADOBE MAGIC: EDITING SCANNED IMAGES & PHOTOS

At the heart of the new release are some deep innovations that will change how people work with digital documents. For example, Acrobat DC can now open a scanned image and determine the text regions with sophisticated image processing techniques. Acrobat DC then dynamically creates “synthesized” fonts to help preserve the look-and-feel. This solution scales across different image resolutions and works on multiple languages, enabling an experience of editing which is as intuitive as normal text editing. Notably, this has been one of the most popular new features among our technical beta testers.

Another hard problem that we address with Acrobat DC is around enhancing scanned images and documents that were captured via tablet or phone. These images frequently suffer from incorrect perspectives, shadows and tough lighting, often making them unusable. Acrobat DC introduces a solution to transform these images into a digital document suitable for reuse, extraction, and archival. Powered by advanced image processing techniques from Adobe’s Photoshop “know how”, Acrobat DC performs automatic text improvement, background noise and shadow removal, and intuitive cleaning controls – all without any degradation. We further use a set of techniques to accurately detect the boundaries of documents and fix their perspective.

THE LAST MILE OF DIGITAL | DEMOCRATIZING E-SIGNATURE CAPABILITIES

It’s crazy that in the year 2015, organizations are still using fax, paper, and over-night envelopes to get important documents signed. Our research shows that 98% of all contracts in North America are still done on paper. The government legislation and technical capabilities needed to address this divide have existing for more than a decade, yet worldwide adoption of e-signatures stands close to 4%. I call this this the “last mile of going digital.” Until now, organizations had to look to point-solutions that would bolt-on to line of business systems. This is no longer the case. With Acrobat DC and the Document Cloud, we are making e-sign a core service which is immediately available to hundreds of millions of users that depend on our Reader technologies.

For our enterprise customers, the e-Sign capabilities of the Document Cloud are built from the ground-up to work with the line of business systems you depend on. Native support and integration for salesforce.com, Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics, Ariba, Apttus and others are core to the new release, and more than 10 major ISVs have already embedded Document Cloud e-sign services into their offers. The services also meet the demands for security, privacy, availability, and manageability needed by global organizations.

For individuals, Adobe is making it simple to get critical documents and forms e-signed from any device. A great example of this is our new “Fill & Sign” capability, which makes it easy to digitize a paper-based form – such as a school permission slip or patient intake form – and sign it electronically for free. You just take a photo of the paper-based form from your tablet device and then take advantage of the smart autofill technology across devices, so you don’t have to re-type personal information.

THE DOCUMENT CLOUD – OUR PLATFORM FOR FUTURE INNOVATION

Perhaps the most exciting part of the release for Adobe, our customers, and our partners, is the new direction we’re taking with the launch of the Document Cloud. The Document Cloud delivers robust e-sign and PDF services for both organizations and for personal use. Innovations we’re announcing today include:

Cloud-Based PDF services. The new Document Cloud provides people with powerful tools to create PDFs, export PDFs into a range of file types, send and track business-critical PDFs, and more.

Mobile Link. We’ve created a personal “Document Profile,” which saves your signature, and enables you to save data securely in a personal autofill collection. We also help keep track of their PDFs across devices. For example, if you view a file on a tablet, the file is available to you the next time you open Acrobat DC on your PC.

Over the next few years, we will build-out a comprehensive set of document workflow, protection, analytics, and publishing services that work not only with Acrobat DC, but also integrate seamlessly into enterprise applications. We’ll make it easy to create and publish high-impact documents that look great on any device. We’ll also start to integrate the Document Cloud with business-critical workflows with the Adobe Marketing Cloud, and the Creative Cloud.

Even though Adobe has been at the business of digital documents for more than 20 years, there’s no question that the next 20 will be our most exciting. We’re just getting started with helping people and organizations re-think the way we work with documents.

My Questions is
1. how do we incorporate this process into Adobe form.
2. Once signed, form gets locked.
3. Upon locking customer gets a copy emailed to them.
4. Any errors/corrections need to be edited and added as separate lines (or page)but original locked copy stays as same.
5. Corrected copy signed (if required).
6. Upon completion form sent to Invoicing.

When is Adobe going to address the mobile issues of forms? Adobe reader for mobile i.e.; on the iPad doesn’t understand java scripts so the form is dead except for some simple check boxes. We develop forms that walk the user thru them. We don’t want certain sections or questions answered if a checkbox is checked or unchecked.

When is Adobe going to address these issues. If a client has to always use a laptop or computer to fill our forms out and not an iPad or tablet we will not be moving away from paper anytime soon.

we are currently looking for something that we can use for when our vendors onto sight.
what we would want is a system so that the vendor could read our code of conduct and safety procedures/pro cautions and sign saying that they comply/under stand.
upon signing the document we would then want it to be saved for up to a year.